


Can We Get Back To Politics (Please)?

by shewho



Series: The '98 Campaign [1]
Category: The West Wing
Genre: F/M, Flashbacks, Friends to Lovers back to Friends and then back to Lovers, Josh Lyman Centric, M/M, Missing Scene, Past Relationship(s), Political Campaigns, Pre-Canon, They're Playing The Long Game
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-04-12
Updated: 2019-04-12
Packaged: 2019-11-16 01:28:11
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,934
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18084794
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/shewho/pseuds/shewho
Summary: After Nashua, Josh returns to New York to wrap up his recruitment deal with Sam.To say that Lisa takes it poorly would be an understatement of the greatest magnitude.





	Can We Get Back To Politics (Please)?

May, 1997 – New York, NY

“I can’t believe I did that,” Sam says, standing in the Gage-Whitney parking garage forty minutes later.

It had taken all of five minutes to whip together and print a boilerplate resignation letter – _Dear Sirs, please accept this letter as notification that I am ~~cutting ties~~ resigning from my position as legal ~~technically legal but ethically dubious~~ counsel for blah blah billionaire oil merchants, while I regret ~~nothing~~ blah blah bullshit bullshit and apologize for the abruptness of my departure, something something smooth transition, effective immediately; Regards, S. Seaborn _– plus another ten to process paperwork (collection of final paycheck, which benefits Sam forfeits for failing to provide two weeks’ notice, and so forth) down in HR. They spent the remaining time packing Sam’s office bric-à-brac into four neat boxes, which Josh magnanimously agreed to help carry out to Sam’s car.

“I can’t believe you still _drive_ in New York,” Josh retorts, hefting the not-insubstantial weight of Sam’s cartons into the trunk.

“Can we please focus more on the fact that I just quit my job, and less on the fact that I own a car? Which, I’m just saying, is a perfectly normal, adult thing to have. Actually, one could argue –”

“You made the right move,” Josh interrupts, trying to curb the oncoming ramble before it gains traction. “He really is the real thing,” he says, not for the first time in the past forty minutes.

Sam looks at him expectantly. He’s worrying his lower lip between his teeth the way he does when he’s anxious, looking a little wild around the eyes. He won’t ask again, would be too embarrassed to make Josh repeat himself for a fifth time, but Josh _knows_ Sam.  

“I promise,” Josh says. Even though his voice barely clears a whisper, the words sound deadly serious in the concrete chill. “I wouldn’t’ve – if it wasn’t, if I didn’t think –” He cuts himself off with a shake of his head, tries to formulate a sentence that isn’t _“I couldn’t leave you behind, not on something this important”_.

“I wouldn’t have come back if I wasn’t sure he was the real thing,” he says instead.

Sam chews his lip for another endless beat of silence, impossibly quiet in the stillness of the parking structure. “Okay,” he agrees finally.

Josh grins. “Okay,” he repeats, laughing a little.

The brightness of Sam’s responding smile reassures him that he’s made the right choice, too.

And, god, seeing Sam smile like that is like… like seeing the sun blaze out from behind a cloud, or something equally sickening and sappy. It’s been a long time. He’d nearly forgotten what it feels like to bask in the warmth of a real, true Sam Seaborn sunbeam smile. It blinds Josh to everything but Sam, who almost seems to glow from the inside out like he’s swallowed a star.

“Hey, d’you want me to drive?” Josh asks, realizing that he’s still standing there grinning, slightly awestruck.

Sam stares back, quizzical, until Josh laughs. It comes out staccato and frenzied and verging towards manic, an expulsion of all the anxiety he’s managed to work up since the bus left Nashua at five o’clock this morning.

 _God_ , he was so afraid Sam would say ‘no’.

“Joking!” he gasps, still chuckling. “I’m joking, Sam! Shit,” Josh shakes his head, pulling open the passenger door. “When did you get to be such a control freak? You used to let me drive all the time.”

“Sorry,” Sam says absently as he slides in behind the wheel. He still sits too close to the steering column. Josh used to make fun of him for it, tell him that he drove like a four-foot-two grandmother who had to have the seat pushed forward to reach the pedals, and Sam would always reply, _“You don’t have to mock my driving posture just because it’s superior to yours, you know.”_

September, 1992 – Washington, D.C.

> “‘ _Superior’_ my ass,” Josh mutters, lowering his sunglasses onto his face. “Your driving posture sucks. If you ever get hit with an airbag it’s gonna break, like, all your ribs.”
> 
> Sam twists himself sideways in the passenger’s seat, rummaging around on the rear floor for the shoebox full of cassettes, fodder for Josh’s ancient tape deck. “Yeah, well, luckily for me I have yet to be in an accident, fatal or otherwise. Unlike some people.” He nudges Josh’s arm with his elbow. “You want _Late for the Sky_ or _Against the Grain_?”
> 
> Josh makes a face, knowing full well that Sam can’t see it. “Do I not have any Doobie Brothers back there? ‘Cause I gotta say, that seems statistically unlikely.”
> 
> “Uh,” Sam rifles through the box, a hodgepodge of homemade mixtapes and store-bought.  “Well, there’s one in here that looks like you cut together half of _Nebraska_ with selected songs from _Minute by Minute_ , but also has a bunch of Zevon tracks? So that’s a thematic mixed bag.” Josh hears him toss it aside, a dull _shunk_ of plastic on plastic. “Should’ve just called that tape _‘Misc. Mix’_.”
> 
> “Yes,” Josh replies, keeping his eyes on the road. “Because adding more alliteration to my life would solve all my problems.”
> 
> “Couldn’t hurt. Also,” Sam cranes his head around to peer at Josh, “And note that I’m saying this as both a friend and fellow underpaid government employee – but would it actually kill you to update your stereo system in here? I mean, let’s face it; it’s not 1985, Josh. Two years ago? Three-hundred million compact discs sold in the U.S.; four-hundred million cassettes. Last year? CD sales go up forty-seven million units; cassettes go down eighty-two million units. I’m just saying,” he says with an awkward half-shrug, turning back to continue perusing the box. “I don’t think you’re gonna lose big if you suck it up and get a CD player.”
> 
> “Thanks, Sam, ‘cause that’s definitely where I think my focus should be right now. On buying a new stereo and perfecting my tape titling game.” He drums his thumbs against the steering wheel, waiting for the light to change. “Not on anything important like, I dunno, the latest whip count on LN-386, or finding soft spots in the new defense package.”
> 
> “It’s not like you can’t do better,” Sam retorts, his voice slightly muffled from the backseat. “You literally made a tape called _‘Tolerable Jazz Piano’_. While there’s something to be said for a succinct summarization, this is just dry. And sad. Like, Dorothea-Lange-Dust-Bowl-photos sad. And dry, actually.” Sam gives a pleased little huff punctuated by the sound of plastic cassette cases being shuffled. “That metaphor had more juice than I thought.”
> 
> “Sam, c’mon. Is there an answer to my question somewhere on the horizon?”
> 
> “Oh, you’ve got _The Captain and Me_ ; you want that one?”
> 
> One hand on the wheel, he drags Sam upright by the back of his shirt. “Give it here.”

May, 1997 – New York, NY

“I finally did have an accident,” Sam says, and Josh stops laughing because _what the fuck?_

“What the fuck?” he blurts. “I didn’t know about that.”

Sam shrugs, fiddling with his keys. “It wasn’t that big a deal. To be honest, I don’t think I told anyone but Lisa.”

Ah, yes. Lisa.

Elisabeth Deborah Sherborne, the presumptive future Mrs. Samuel Norman Seaborn. Vassar undergrad, Columbia M.A. in journalism, copywriter at _Mirabella_. A catch, to be sure.

Lisa, who Josh has seen so trashed on strawberry daquiris that she was unable to count change. Lisa, who won awards for student journalism while at Vassar. Lisa, who prides herself on sampling every boutique coffee house in New York, even though she no longer writes the weekly online Coffee Column (trademarked by News Corp last year). Lisa, who has an enviable instinctive talent for choosing wine pairings. Lisa, who goes on long, Ginsbergian rants when she’s high, who Josh sometimes imagines would’ve been happier growing up in a desert somewhere, some place where life is sacred and water is commodified and neon kitsch is king. Lisa, who’s stifled in the world of women’s magazines. Lisa, whose monogrammed sweaters all have a jaunty ‘LSD’ stitched over the heart.

He never did understand why women’s monograms go first-last-middle initial and men’s go first-middle-last.

“Wow.” The word doesn’t even _begin_ to convey Josh’s shock. “Are you – I mean, is everything okay?”

“Oh! Yeah, fine,” Sam assures him. “Not a big deal, at all. Fucked up the Lexus pretty bad, but I’m fine. No harm.” He starts the car and the radio blares, NPR on preset. Sam punches it off immediately. “Sorry.”

“Don’t be. It’s a nice change from that crap you used to listen to.”

Sam’s blush disappears below his collar as he reaches behind Josh’s seat to look at the back window, reversing smoothly out of his parking spot. “My taste in music is impeccable,” he mutters and Josh laughs, remembering all the weird college radio programming Sam used to listen to. The more bizarre and obscure, the better, at least in Sam’s view. Suffice to say that WRGW radio features heavily in the background of many-if-not-most of Josh’s early Sam-related memories.

“Sam, you once made me a tape that was just Spanish protest music from the seventies interspersed with different recordings of the same six songs from _Iolanthe_.”

“I…yes, I did do that, but to be fair I felt that you might find it educational.”

“In what way?”

“I don’t recall.”

There’s a bit of a to-do at the security stand with Sam handing over his keycards and garage tag, saying a last goodbye to the guard on duty, whose name tag says MARJORIE, who calls Sam _‘Sugar’_ and wishes him well.

“So, I meant to ask the other day but how’s that going with Lisa?” Josh asks as they pull out onto the street and into the rain. “The whole,” he waves his hand in a broad circle as if to encompass the entire institution of marriage, “Engagement business.”

 _“Lisa and I are getting married in September,”_ Sam had said.

That in and of itself is difficult for Josh to wrap his head around. He’s broken up three times since the last time he saw Sam, a little over a year ago. The longest of those relationships only lasted four months. His last girlfriend had called him ambitious, and abrasive. She said the words like they should’ve hurt Josh, or made him think twice before he shredded her weak position on universal healthcare. Instead, he took them as a compliment and she broke up with him because of it.

 _‘Ambitious’_ is a word that comes to mind when he thinks of Sam. Restlessly ambitious.

“Good! It’s good!”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah,” Sam nods, not taking his eyes off the road. “It’s really…it’s good. I mean, it’s hard to find time to plan everything out when we’re both working these stupidly long hours – I’m talking, like, sixty-five, seventy-hour weeks, even though I usually only bill for forty – but it all gets done eventually. We hash out a lot of arrangements by phone these days.”

“That’s crazy.”

Josh doesn’t specify whether it’s Sam’s hours that he’s referring to, or the general chaos of wedding planning. He isn’t entirely sure. It just seems like appropriate filler.

“I know, right? I mean, some if it comes easy. Like floral arrangements; those were a given. We both agree that carnations and roses always look cheap, and should therefore be reserved for funeral wreaths and homecoming boutonnieres. But then there’s all this other stuff that seems so trivial.” Sam knocks his wipers up a notch, unphased by the rain pelting his windows. “It’s like some kind of wedding industry insider tactic to drive brides absolutely up the wall before their nuptials, I swear. Like, how many vaguely off-white napkins d’you think we had to pick from?”

“Eight?” Josh guesses, pulling a number from thin air.

“Try _twenty-six_.”

Josh swears emphatically.

“This is what my life is like now. This is what it’s come to. I comparison shop cloth napkins and fight about cake toppers.”

“Please tell me you’re fighting against that entire concept. It’s creepy.”

Outside the liminal stillness of the car, it’s pouring rain. Along both sides of the street, people crowd into doorways, pop open umbrellas or pull the hoods of anoraks tight over their heads.

From inside, the whole thing reads as weirdly climactic, like something out of a pulp novel you’d buy in an airport kiosk. Rapprochement. A reunion in the rain.

“Trust me,” Sam chuckles. “I am fully seated in the anti-cake-topper camp. Especially the customized ones, where you have to send in little pictures of yourselves to get the figures made up just so.”

Sheets of rain whip through the air, wrinkling the flat surface of puddles forming in the gutters and hammering at the windshield, looking for a way in. Six years ago, the preowned Saab that had seen Sam through law school acquired a long meandering crack almost all the way across its windshield. Since the flaw was positioned low enough that it didn’t really obscure anything, Sam never took it in to be repaired.  Josh feels a vague pang on longing for that old Saab and its bumper plastered with losing presidential tickets: _Peterson/Gerash ‘90, Tate/Mollica ‘86, Henshall/Tonner ‘82._

These days, Josh can’t imagine Sam zipping around Midtown Manhattan in anything less than a showroom-ready car. Case in point: the sleek Mercedes compact they’re sitting in right this minute.

“Besides,” Sam says, merging across two lanes without signaling. “Lisa can pretty much work anywhere there’s a laptop.” That used to make Josh crazy, what a typically Californian driver Sam was – _is._ Four years of living in Boston may have provided Josh with the world’s most nerve-racking crash course in defensive driving, but Sam first learned to drive amidst California’s hellscape of a freeway system, and it shows. “The last time we went up to Belleayre, she spent most of the drive putting together our save-the-dates.”

“She still make you go skiing all the time?”

Sam snorts, bobbing his head in acknowledgement. “Yeah. It’s sort of a trade-off. In the winter, we ski; in the summer, we sail. We each get a season and it all evens out in the end.”

“Shame that your sense of fair play means you spend half the year doing something you hate.”

“I don’t _hate_ skiing,” Sam insists. “I never did; I’m just terrible at it. Besides, ski season’s over.”

“Small blessings,” Josh mutters, staring out the window. His reflection peers back from the side mirror, hair – still damp from the downpour – beginning to dry in frizzy curls. OBJECTS IN MIRROR ARE CLOSER THAN THEY APPEAR. Now _there_ is a breathtakingly accurate metaphor to describe his entire relationship with Sam. And apparently Sam’s relationship with Lisa.

He didn’t think they were that serious, is the thing. Sure, Sam and Lisa have been dating for nearly three years now, but engagement is a big step towards real, serious commitment – legally binding commitment; the kind of commitment that Josh was pretty sure Sam would eschew at least a little longer if not indefinitely.

“Last weekend we went to taste cake samples. Apparently,” Sam says with a put-on tone of faux-authority, “The fashionable flavor for wedding cakes in 1997 is going to be either plum torte – which isn’t even a _cake_ so I’m not sure why it’s being considered in the first place – or red velvet.”

Josh’s lip curls in involuntary disgust. “Gross.”

“Right, I forgot. You think red velvet just tastes like cream cheese and food coloring.”

“‘Cause it _does_.”

“I think you just have a sensitivity to food dyes, Josh. I think that’s the real issue at play here.”

He whacks Sam’s shoulder with the back of his hand, the reflex still instinctive even after so many years.

“Hey!” Sam yelps. “The fact that your body’s delicate internal equilibrium is easily overwhelmed by alcohol and artificial additives is not my fault!”

“Fuck off.”

“And off I would fuck if off I could fuck,” Sam retorts in a sardonic sing-song. “But you’re stuck with me for now ‘cause I’m the one driving.”

“Hi- _larious_.”

Sam sticks out his tongue and blows a raspberry at that, a move so juvenile and incongruous with the spiffed-up image he cuts in his suit and tie that Josh can’t help laughing. It makes Sam laugh, too, and Josh stares at him openly, just for a second. It’s a good look for Sam, a real, genuine laugh that makes his eyes all crinkly in the corners, the sort that lights up his whole face.

 _Fuck_ , he’s missed this.

He’d forgotten ~~made himself forget~~ how _effortless_ the banter and camaraderic affection are when he’s with Sam. Like a thread picked up seamlessly, easy as anything. (In the basement of his brain, a vague warning bell clangs discordantly, awareness prickling the surface of his conscious mind.)

They’re verging into dangerously familiar territory here, into old roles they used to occupy an age ago. Of course, they don’t anymore. They’re not like that anymore. They’re not anything anymore; there is no _‘they’_ , no more _SamandJosh_ , no _JoshandSam_. Just a pair of binary points separated by the tiniest of spaces, barely the width of a fingernail, dovetailing inexplicably.

The only single-word anagram of _dovetail_ , Sam once told him, is _violated_.

This space, here and now – this space in inviolable. Come September, Lisa can have Sam until death do they part, consecrated unto one another by the State of New York.

Until then, he’ll take what he can get.  


End file.
